Background: The detection and extraction of causality from natural language sentences have shown great potential in various fields of application. The field of requirements engineering is eligible for multiple reasons: (1) requirements artifacts are primarily written in natural language, (2) causal sentences convey essential context about the subject of requirements, and (3) extracted and formalized causality relations are usable for a (semi-)automatic translation into further artifacts, such as test cases. Objective: We aim at understanding the value of interactive causality extraction based on syntactic criteria for the context of requirements engineering. Method: We developed a prototype of a system for automatic causality extraction and evaluate it by applying it to a set of publicly available requirements artifacts, determining whether the automatic extraction reduces the manual effort of requirements formalization. Result: During the evaluation we analyzed 4457 natural language sentences from 18 requirements documents, 558 of which were causal (12.52%). The best evaluation of a requirements document provided an automatic extraction of 48.57% cause-effect graphs on average, which demonstrates the feasibility of the approach. Limitation: The feasibility of the approach has been proven in theory but lacks exploration of being scaled up for practical use. Evaluating the applicability of the automatic causality extraction for a requirements engineer is left for future research. Conclusion: A syntactic approach for causality extraction is viable for the context of requirements engineering and can aid a pipeline towards an automatic generation of further artifacts from requirements artifacts.

翻译：背景：从自然语言句子中检测和提取因果关系已在多个应用领域展现出巨大潜力。需求工程领域因以下原因尤为适用：（1）需求工件主要采用自然语言编写，（2）因果句传达了关于需求主题的重要上下文信息，（3）提取并形式化的因果关系可用于（半）自动转换为测试用例等其他工件。目标：我们旨在理解基于句法标准的交互式因果关系提取在需求工程背景下的价值。方法：我们开发了自动因果关系提取系统原型，并通过将其应用于一组公开可用的需求工件进行评估，确定自动提取是否减少了需求形式化的人工工作量。结果：评估过程中，我们分析了来自18份需求文档的4457个自然语言句子，其中558个为因果句（占12.52%）。对一份需求文档的最佳评估显示平均自动提取率达48.57%的因果图，证明了该方法的可行性。局限性：该方法的可行性已在理论上得到验证，但尚未探索其在实际应用中的规模化扩展。评估自动因果关系提取对需求工程师的适用性留待未来研究。结论：基于句法的因果关系提取方法在需求工程背景下具有可行性，有助于构建从需求工件自动生成其他工件的处理流程。